Customer-to-customer (“C2C”) marketplaces facilitate the sale of physical and digital goods from marketplace customers to other customers. For instance, a World Wide Web (“Web”) site may be configured to provide an online C2C marketplace in which customers can list items for sale. Other customers of these types of C2C marketplaces can browse items for sale and purchase these items through the marketplace. Item sellers may ship purchased items directly to buyers or may use warehouse services provided by the merchant operating the C2C marketplace to fulfill orders.
Current C2C marketplaces do not provide functionality for facilitating the return of purchased items from a buyer to a seller. As a result, buyers must typically communicate directly with marketplace sellers to facilitate the return of purchased items. For instance, if a buyer desires to return a purchased item for any reason, the buyer may be required to send an e-mail message directly to the marketplace seller requesting authorization to return the item. Sellers must manually respond to these messages with a message indicating that authorization to return a purchased item has been granted or has been denied.
High-volume C2C marketplace sellers may receive many hundreds of messages each day from buyers requesting authorization to return purchased items. Individually processing such a high volume of return authorization messages from buyers may be difficult and time-consuming for C2C marketplace sellers. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.